


Laid in Earth

by lurrel



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Character of Color, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-13
Updated: 2011-03-13
Packaged: 2017-10-16 22:48:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/170229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurrel/pseuds/lurrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For an Inception kink_meme prompt.</p><p>Yusuf counts his scars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Laid in Earth

Yusuf has exactly five scars from glass, marring his dark skin with trapped, tangible memories. He likes to think of himself as well travelled, even before falling in with Cobb & his gang of bandits, because every country he's called home has cut into him deep.

-

A Muslim born in India, Yusuf is the first in his family to make it to secondary school. His family is poor, dirt poor, and he trudges to school without shoes to make sure they will last the year. He will be sent home if his uniform, his expensive, ill-fitting, scratchy uniform is not complete, and he does not want to risk damaging the black leather.

One day, his foot meets a broken bottle on a crowded street in Mumbai. He stumbles and his foot spills blood onto pavement and garbage, but he makes it to school, where he sits on the step and pulls on sock over his bloody and dusty foot. It soaks with red immediately and all through class he thinks his shoe is filling slowly with hot blood, and that once it is full he will die. The wound burns for hours.

The scar stays raised, white and angry, in delicate arch of his foot.

-

His escape is California, the grand United States. He earns a scholarship and goes to study science at his father’s request. Yusuf means "he will add," and he does, building chemicals with uses that have yet to be invented. It is during his PhD studies that he is introduced to the dream world, the fantastical dimension brought about by creative chemistry and sturdy engineering. He work gets published, but it is not without sacrifice – long hours in the lab, self-testing, nightmares. Dependence. One night he is so desperate to return to his own private land of Nod that he gets sloppy, a test tube overheating and bursting under his addict’s eye.

The scar wraps from his palm, light and pink, through the valley of his index finger and thumb.

-

By the time Eames first contacts him for a job in Saudi Arabia, Yusuf has his own reputation. Eames rolls into his pharmacy, a charming grin on his face as he shooed away the lone customer.

"I hear you're the best at what you do," the man drawls, and Yusuf raises his eyebrows.

"I am fairly good at mixing cough syrups," Yusuf says dryly, eyeing the white man through the protective glass of his counter.

Eames doesn't like wasting time, even then, and he whips out his gun. He shoots through the glass and it shatters, despite the small vinyl sticker proclaiming it shatterproof. Yusuf barely ducks in time, and ends up with a large piece of shrapnel in his shoulder.

The job, it turns out, is a very good one, but the scar keloids, pink and bumpy and angry.

-

Mombasa is another hot, dry place in Yusuf’s life, but it is an easy place to disappear in. Running a modern day, high tech opium den is hardly what he imagined using his degrees for, years ago, but it earns him enough to send his youngest sister, unmarried, to a private school out of the country. Her college fund is already paid for.

He is fond of his customers, perhaps too fond, but they are very loyal. The first man to die the real death in his establishment does so after asking, pushing to be put under for an entire day. Yusuf eventually acquiesces because the man is old and family-less, with no tethers to the city around them or the wider world outside of that. Yusuf sits by his bed a little too long, tears sometimes escaping, as he thinks of what to do with the body. When his assistant brings him water, his hand shakes so much that he drops the cup. Clumsy, his hands are embedded with glass when he tries to retrieve the shards.

The small cuts match the tiny welts of burns from his days in school, from nights in the lab, but they keep him from forgetting. They keep him from pushing too far.

-

In the dream world, glass from the van scrapes his face, cutting it open above his eye and blood works to obscure his vision as he tries to drive, stay steady, and shoot a gun simultaneously. As he scrambles to escape the van the blood mingles with the water, and the cut stings.

In the airplane bathroom, he can't help running his hand over and over his temple. The phantom twinge translates to exactly nothing in the land of the real, and he wonders if he'll remember.


End file.
